aiki
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- Feb 16, 2007
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Actually, this isn't the true state of things - at least from the Christian perspective. We are born with a propensity to sin, but God offers us a remedy in the person of Christ. God's holiness and justice demand that sin be punished, but His mercy and love have made a way for all men to escape that punishment. God knows we cannot win free of our desire to sin on our own, so He has in His great grace reached out and offered us His strength to change. And when we accept His gracious offer, he rewards us with an eternity with Himself. This is rather a different picture than the one you've painted above, I think.
Oh? God has given and ultimately takes every human life. But this is His prerogative as the Creator and Sustainer of everything. Obviously, God does not work within the same constraints as you and I. You haven't yet laid out the context within which God's command to destroy the Midianites was given...
Do you know what the definition of God is? By definition, God is without cause. If God has a cause, He cannot be God. Your question about what caused God is like asking how many right angles there are in a circle, or how many feathers there are on a fish. By definition, circles don't have right angles, fish don't have feathers, and God has no cause. In anticipation of your "logic," Liebniz defines things more carefully and refers to things which exist as a necessity of their own nature in his cosmological argument (like numbers and mathematical sets -- and God). Your hasty dismissal of the Kalam Cosmological Argument as a poor one reveals a somewhat superficial consideration of the argument.
Again, this rebuttal doesn't hold water for the reason I gave above. There are things which are necessarily existent as a consequence of their own nature, like numbers, and then there are things which are contingent and require a cause. God, by definition, falls within the first class of things. To ask what caused God is to misunderstand His nature.
The universe cannot always have existed for a number of reasons:
1. The Big Bang Theory and the Bord, Guth, Vilenkin Theorem show that this is impossible.
2. An actual infinite number of past events, which would be required if the universe had always existed, cannot exist. Absurdities arise when one asserts that an actual infinite number of things exist. The great German mathematician David Hilbert demonstrates some of these absurdities in his "Hilbert's Hotel" illustration. You can read about this illustration on the 'net.
3. You can't pass through an infinite number of elements one at a time. Consider trying to count to infinity. No matter how high you count, there is always an infinity of numbers left to count. And what about trying to count down from infinity? Well, you run into the same problem. Before any number could be counted an infinity of numbers will have to be counted first.
Think of an infinite line of dominoes: In order for the final domino in this infinite line to fall an infinite number of dominoes had to fall first. Consequently, the final domino can never be reached. But if this true of the line of dominoes, it also true of an infinity of time. For today to have been reached, an infinity of days must already have passed (if the universe has always existed), which is impossible. Today has been reached, which tells us plainly that time is finite, which means that the universe had a beginning.
4. The thermodynamics of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics has a grim implication for the future of the universe. Given enough time, all the energy in the universe will spread itself out evenly throughout the universe at which time no life will be possible. The universe will grow cold, and dark and lifeless. This is what scientists refer to as the "heat death" of the universe.
The question that arises from this consideration is why, given that the universe has existed forever, has the universe not yet reached this state of energy equilibrium? If in an finite amount of time, heat death will be attained in the universe, then given an infinite past time, the universe should already be completely cold, dark, and lifeless. But it isn't. This suggest very strongly that the universe could not, in fact, have always existed.
I disagree. The concept of God requires that He be self-causing. If God has been caused then that which brought forth God is God. That God is uncaused as a necessity of His own nature is a perfectly reasonable characterization of God, especially in light of other necessarily uncaused things we can point to like numbers and mathematical sets.
Please demonstrate how the moral argument relies on baseless assertion for its success. You have declared that this is so without any justification.
To answer "a." Is the persecution of homosexuals wrong? Is racial discrimination wrong? Is torturing babies for fun wrong? Is rape and murder wrong? If someone cuts in line ahead of you do you clap him on the back and say, "Well done?" Or do you resent his line-cutting and condemn it as wrong?
To answer "b" and "c." The only reasonable ground out of which objective morality can arise is God. Social convention, humanism, atheistic moral platonism all have serious flaws which exclude them as reasonable sources of objective morality.
Getting a bit ahead of things, I think. You've tried simply to dismiss my offered arguments, but rather unsuccessfully. Before we get mired in empirical evidence you need to reasonably show why the evidence I've already given you is ruled out. So far, all you've done is offer the shallowest of rebuttals to the arguments I've offered. It will take a lot more than this to invalidate them.
Here are six explicit reasons:
1. The unity of Scripture given the nature of its writing. (Written over the span of approximately 1500 years, on three different continents, by over 40 different people, in widely varying walks of life, in three different languages).
2. The persistent popularity and powerful impact of Scripture through history on societies and cultures.
3. Fulfilled prophecy.
4. The proven historicity of Scripture.
5. Personal experience of the truth and power of Scripture.
(While this is not a knock-out punch in terms of evidence it is still legitimate to offer it as evidence. Advertisers use this kind of "evidence" all the time as a means of establishing the efficacy of their products. Courts of law allow personal testimony as well.)
6. The degree to which the contents of Scripture corresponds to reality.
I see. And your point is?
Selah.
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